Even before the recent (inconsequential) quake outside DC, Claire Berlinski declared seismic risk mitigation the greatest urban policy challenge that the world confronts today:
If you consider that too strong a claim, try to imagine another way in which bad urban policy could kill a million people in 30 seconds.
Many of the world’s biggest cities are built more like Port-au-Prince than like Christchurch — even when they have the means to build safely:
Wealth, in and of itself, is not enough to get people to take earthquakes seriously. Here is the evidence. On February 27, 2010, an earthquake measuring 8.8 on the Richter scale struck near the city of Concepción, in Chile. While the epicenter was not at the heart of the city, this quake was 100 times bigger than the one that leveled Port-au-Prince. It was so massive that it shortened the length of the day by 1.26 microseconds and moved the earth on its axis by eight centimeters. When it was over, the entire city of Concepción had been moved three yards to the west.
The death toll from this monster was 521. Each death was its own disaster, of course, but the number was nevertheless astoundingly small for an earthquake that, by all rights, should have destroyed Chile as a whole. So minimal was the damage that the Chileans rejected all offers of foreign aid; they didn’t need it. Chile did so well because its building codes are some of the strictest and most advanced in the world and because the codes do not merely exist on paper—they are enforced.
Now consider Turkey. Like Chile, Turkey is no stranger to earthquakes. In 1509, an earthquake killed between 5 and 10 percent of Constantinople’s population. The Ottomans called it K?yamet-i Su?ra, the Minor Judgment Day. Since then, the city has suffered serious quake damage 11 times, most recently at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1939, moreover, came the first of what have now been seven earthquakes on the Anatolian fault line, each exceeding 7 on the Richter scale. Every time a major rupture occurs on the fault, it transfers stress further along the line, making a subsequent earthquake more likely. The quakes are marching westward from eastern Turkey toward Istanbul. The most recent took place in 1999, near Izmit, a city about 60 miles from Istanbul; as many as 45,000 were killed, and 600,000 were left homeless.
There is not a geologist alive who doubts that a major earthquake is likely to hit Istanbul soon. In 2000, the U.S. Geological Survey put the odds of its happening within 30 years at 62 percent; other survey teams give it 70 percent. Erdik has estimated that it will kill between 200,000 and 300,000 people. The cost of the cleanup—$50 billion would be an optimistic estimate—will surely set Turkey’s economy back decades. It will be a political cataclysm, with massive ramifications for the entire region.
Every day, I walk past buildings in Istanbul that are clearly unsound. I see ground floors, for example, with walls or columns removed to make way for store displays, violating one of the most important principles of earthquake-resistant construction. There are vast neighborhoods filled with illegal, flimsy structures called gecekondu, which means “landed overnight.” The gecekondu, which range from crude shanties to concrete multistory apartment blocks, house hundreds of thousands of rural migrants who have come to Istanbul seeking work over the past decade. Gecekondu aren’t built by engineers. They tend to be built on bad soil. They are packed with children.
Even buildings approved by engineers, warned a recent study by the Turkish Chamber of Civil Engineers, are largely not built to code; only half are earthquake-proof. The chamber also warned that 86 percent of the city’s hospitals were at high risk of collapse. Turkey’s biggest builders have freely admitted to using shoddy materials, such as sea sand and scrap iron, in buildings made of reinforced concrete. In fact, construction standards here are so lousy that buildings regularly collapse without the aid of an earthquake.
Is it because Turkey is poor? Per-capita GDP in Chile this year is $15,867. In Turkey, it is $14,077. That’s not a huge difference.
The contrast between Turkey and Japan is even greater:
Contrast Turkey with Japan, where “there’s no such thing as an honest mistake,” as one American who has lived there for years puts it. “Every mistake is a moral failure. In other words, you should have worked harder, you should have prepared better, you should have been more careful. So even their [emergency] practice drills have to be rehearsed. Everybody has practiced.” After the March quake, journalist Kirk Spitzer, who lives in Japan, wrote about the culture of earthquake preparedness there: “Our shelves are lined with rubberized material to keep glasses and plate-ware from sliding; nothing fell over and broke, not even delicate champagne glasses we brought from Paris. Elsewhere, floor-mounted latches kept bedroom and hallway doors from slamming or breaking loose. Picture rails built into the ceiling kept even heavy frames from crashing to the floor.”
Ordinary, middle-class Japanese people take these steps to protect their drinking glasses. Many museums in Istanbul fail to take similar steps to protect priceless sculptures, ceramics, and cuneiform.
This sums it up:
Fatalism kills. Short-term thinking kills. But above all, corruption kills.